An executive from Target’s growing retail media business, Roundel, has expressed firm confidence in the retail giant’s methodology for measuring a crucial advertising metric, while simultaneously acknowledging a significant hurdle in the marketplace: major advertisers are simply not yet ready to fully rely on it.
During an industry event for advertisers held in New York on Tuesday, Shawn McGahee, senior director of performance and insights for Roundel, addressed the current landscape of retail media measurement. While addressing the gathered brand partners and industry professionals, McGahee discussed the nuances of tracking advertising effectiveness and revealed a striking statistic regarding how modern brands approach campaign evaluation. According to McGahee, a mere 8% of Roundel’s advertisers are currently utilizing incrementality measurement as the primary performance metric for their respective businesses.
For the past couple of years, Target and a growing cohort of other major retailers operating their own retail media networks have strongly encouraged brands and advertisers to adopt incrementality as a standard for measuring the success of their retail campaigns. Incrementality is an advanced analytical metric designed to determine the exact sales revenue generated directly by an advertising campaign, contrasting it against the baseline sales that would have naturally occurred even without showing the ad to consumers. To calculate this, networks and brands often compare sales performance across carefully selected test-and-control groups, isolating the true impact of the marketing spend from organic consumer demand.
The push toward incrementality by retail media networks comes as brands increasingly demand greater transparency and accountability for their advertising dollars. In the traditional digital advertising ecosystem, metrics such as click-through rates, impressions, and last-touch attribution have long dominated. However, retail media networks possess a unique advantage: closed-loop reporting that connects ad exposure directly to actual purchase data, whether online or in-brick-and-mortar stores. Incrementality takes this a step further by attempting to prove causation rather than mere correlation, answering the fundamental question of whether the ad actually persuaded a shopper to buy a product they otherwise would have ignored.
Despite the theoretical soundness and long-term benefits of this measurement approach, Tuesday’s disclosure by McGahee highlights a persistent gap between retail media innovation and advertiser readiness. While tech-forward networks like Roundel have built robust frameworks to support and measure incrementality, the broader advertising community appears hesitant to make it the cornerstone of their campaign evaluations. This reluctance can stem from several operational challenges, including the complexity of setting up reliable test-and-control groups, the longer timeframes required to yield statistically significant results, and the deeply entrenched reliance on legacy attribution models that have dominated marketing budgets for decades.
As retail media continues to mature into one of the fastest-growing segments of the digital advertising industry, the tension between sophisticated new measurement techniques and advertiser adoption remains a central theme for networks like Roundel. Executives like McGahee find themselves walking a fine line, championing the accuracy and value of advanced metrics while navigating the practical realities of what brand marketers are prepared to trust and implement in their day-to-day operations. The low adoption rate revealed in New York underscores that while the industry knows where measurement needs to go, getting the vast majority of advertisers to take the leap and completely restructure how they evaluate success will require ongoing education, collaboration, and proof of value from the retail media networks leading the charge.
